It was a very productive day in the vineyard and winery today.

We contined to cold soak our first fermenter of Sangiovese; picture at left. The cold soak extends the amount of time that juice is in contact with the skins helping to extract every bit of flavor and color into the wines. This is especially important with thin skinned varietals like Pinot Noir but helps to build bold deep flavors in all red wines.

We also kicked off the fermentation of our second frementer Sangiovese; with one of our favorite yeasts isolated by the Consorsio del Brunello in Siena. The perfect yeast for this VCR 6, Brunello clone Sangiovese. Yeast can have a huge impact on wine character and in this case it brings out the varietally typical flavors of berry and cherry with very full mouth feel.

At the end of our day our 4 bins of frozen viognier from Seven Hills vineyard came in and went straight into the press for our Dolce Vino Ice Wine you can see the white frost on the berries. The freezing concentrates all of the flavor and sugar and the juice we use to make this wine is typically at about 36 brix .

This is almost double the sugar level of most of our dry white wine musts.

Finally we received 4 bins of Merlot from Le Mirage vineyard in Washington. We will be processing this tomorrow morning with some help from the Harvest Trail participants. I’ll include some pictures of them sorting tomorrow; all in all a full day and good start to the vintage.